Brad Sigmon: Death row inmate to be executed by firing squad, 1st in US in 15 years

COLUMBIA, S.C. – A death row inmate on Friday in South Carolina is set to be the first person to die by firing squad in the U.S. in 15 years — unless the governor or the U.S. Supreme Court grants him a last-minute reprieve. 

Brad Sigmon, 67, said he chose to die by bullets because he considered the other methods offered by the state to be worse.

Here’s what to know:

Brad Sigmon’s crime

The backstory:

Sigmon admitted to killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents in 2001 with a baseball bat after she refused to come back to him.

Investigators said Sigmon was angry that they had him evicted from a trailer they owned. They were in separate rooms of their Greenville County home and Sigmon went back and forth attacking them until they were dead, according to prosecutors.

Sigmon then kidnapped his ex-girlfriend at gunpoint, but she escaped from his car. He shot at her as she ran, but missed, prosecutors said.

“My intention was to kill her and then myself,” Sigmon said in a confession typed out by a detective after his arrest. “That was my intention all along. If I couldn’t have her, I wasn’t going to let anybody else have her. And I knew it got to the point where I couldn’t have her.”

What we know:

His lawyers said he didn’t want to pick the electric chair, which would “cook him alive,” or a lethal injection, whose details are kept secret in South Carolina. He also feared an injection of pentobarbital into his veins would send a rush of fluid into his lungs and drown him. On Thursday, Sigmon asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay his execution because the state doesn’t release enough information about the lethal injection drug.

How firing squad executions work

Dig deeper:

Sigmon is set to be executed just after 6 p.m. ET at the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia. 

He’ll be walked into the death chamber, which is just a short walk from where he’s lived for the past 23 years on death row. He’ll then be strapped into a chair and have a target placed over his heart. 

Sigmon may utter his last words before a hood is placed over his head. A curtain shielding him from spectators is swept aside, allowing Sigmon’s lawyer, family members of the victims and three members of the news media to watch from behind glass recently upgraded to be bullet resistant.

Three trained volunteers armed with rifles 15 feet away will then simultaneously fire bullets designed to shatter on impact with something hard, like an inmate’s chest bones, sending fragments meant to destroy the heart and cause death almost immediately.

A short time later, a doctor will confirm Sigmon is dead. At most, the process will take five minutes — a quarter of the time needed for a lethal injection.

History of firing squad executions

Big picture view:

The execution method has a long and violent history in the U.S. and around the world. Death in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Timeline:

Since 1608, at least 144 civilian prisoners have been executed by shooting in America, nearly all in Utah. Only three have occurred since 1977, when the use of capital punishment resumed after a 10-year pause. The first of those, Gary Gilmore, caused a media sensation in part because he waived his appeals and volunteered to be executed. When asked for his last words, Gilmore replied, “Let’s do it.”

Five states — Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah — authorize the use of firing squads in certain circumstances.

Ronnie Gardner was the last prisoner to be executed by firing squad, in Utah in 2010. His brother doesn’t agree the method is more humane.

What they’re saying:

“This will be gruesome and barbaric,” Randy Gardner said. He said he didn’t witness his brother’s death but carries his autopsy photos in an envelope. He pulled several out to show an Associated Press reporter who will witness Friday’s execution.

“With the ammunition they are using here (in Sigmon’s execution) it is going to be so much worse,” Gardner said.

The other side:

In recent years, some death penalty proponents have started to see the firing squad as a more humane option: If the shooters’ aim is true, death is nearly instant, whereas lethal injections require getting an IV into a vein. Electrocution appears to burn and disfigure. And inmates have been seen to writhe and struggle when the latest method, nitrogen gas, is used to suffocate them as it is pushed through a mask.

Sigmon’s one last chance to live

What we know:

If the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t intervene, Sigmon has one last chance at survival: His lawyers asked Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to commute his death sentence to life in prison. They said Sigmon is a model prisoner trusted by guards and works every day to atone for the killings he committed after succumbing to severe mental illness.

Sigmon will share his final meal with some fellow prisoners on death row and plans to give away the money in his commissary accounts, his supporters said.

The prison warden will be on a call with McMaster and the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office just before the execution starts. If the lawyers report no outstanding appeals and the governor refuses clemency, Sigmon will be brought into the death chamber.

No South Carolina governor has granted clemency to a prisoner scheduled for execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Since then, 46 men have been put to death in the state.

The state Supreme Court has been issuing death warrants every five weeks. Two more inmates are currently out of appeals; they will also get to choose between lethal injection, firing squad or the electric chair.

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